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Is anyone actually using their local AI voice assistant for more than turning on lights?
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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/ZiritoBlue on 2026-06-29 20:43:45+00:00.
I've been running a fully local voice assistant at home for a while now. Home Assistant ties it together, a local LLM does the thinking, and I've got mic satellites in a few rooms. No cloud assistant, the brain and the voice both run on my own hardware. Basically my daily driver at this point.
Since people here actually build this stuff, here's the rough setup:
- Gemma 26B on llama.cpp on a 3090, reasoning turned off so it stays quick
- followed this guide https://community.home-assistant.io/t/my-journey-to-a-reliable-and-enjoyable-locally-hosted-voice-assistant/944860 shoutout Nicholas
- Parakeet for speech-to-text, Kokoro for the voice, with a custom voice and wake word I trained on the GPU myself
- FutureProofHomes Sat1 mic arrays in a few rooms
- skye-harris's Local OpenAI LLM + Tools for Assist wiring it into HA Assist
- n8n for anything that needs a few steps chained together
And what it's actually hooked into:
- Lights, climate, locks, scenes (the usual). Govee and Adaptive Lighting on the lights, Honeywell for the thermostat, all over MQTT
- Music Assistant + Spotify, plus casting to a Samsung TV with ADB filling the gaps the TV's API refuses to do
- Web search that reads the actual page instead of guessing off snippets (Brave + Jina through n8n)
- Gmail. It reads, searches and drafts replies, but never sends anything on its own
- Calendar over CalDAV into my Nextcloud. It'll even pull appointments out of my inbox
- Met.no weather, Google Maps for drive times, local to-do and shopping lists, radio
- A few homelab bits tied in too (Proxmox, Portainer, Prometheus, Uptime Kuma) so I can just ask if a backup ran
So it already covers a decent amount. What I'm trying to figure out:
- What are you using yours for that I probably haven't thought of?
- Anything that turned out way more useful than you expected?
- Anyone got it talking first instead of just answering, or decent long-term memory, without shipping everything off to a cloud model?
Local only, by the way. Not looking to fall back on Alexa or anything like that. Just trying to see how far this can actually go and what I can improve.